I should not perhaps have deemed it necessary to record thus minutely the particular details of this scene, had not it already been so much dwelt upon in another light. Astonishment and admiration, frivolous and exaggerated, have been expressed with regard to this remarkable act of condescension on the part of Louis Philippe, as though royalty were alone exempt from the debt of manly and honourable gratitude. Why, there is not one of the sovereigns beneath whom Talleyrand had lived, who would not have hurried to show respect to the death-bed of this truly great statesman; and yet all had not been raised to the throne by his means! Napoleon, the stern—the iron-hearted—even he would not have hesitated, because he scorned not to avow that he had owed as much of his political success to the timely counsels of his minister for foreign affairs as to his own skill and foresight. Louis Dixhuit—neither would he have deemed such a step beneath his dignity: he, too, needed no reminding that he was deeply indebted to the Prince de Talleyrand, not perhaps for zeal and activity, but for what, according to time and circumstance, was to him of far more value—his wise, discreet, and generous forbearance: while Charles X. would have come, with pious resignation, to mourn the quenching of this last beacon of the old French aristocracy, and would have rejoiced that by his means it should have been extinguished amid becoming dignity and honour. It was shortly after the departure of the king that the first symptoms of dissolution were observed by the physicians. The whole family, every member of which had been apprised of this, immediately gathered around the prince. The Duke de P—— was there among the number, and I could not forbear a smile as I remembered the satirical observation made by the prince himself, a short time before his illness, upon the occasion of rather a ceremonious visit from this personage,—“Just leaves me in disappointment,” said he, as he departed; “one would think, by his melancholy visage and his lugubrious costume, that he was deputed hither by some _entrepreneur des pompes funèbres_.”